Contact Information Anonymization permanently removes personally identifiable information (PII) from contacts—such as names and addresses (URNs)—while keeping operational data like UUID, groups, language, and custom fields usable for segmentation, flows, campaigns, and anonymized exports, making it suitable for privacy-first or compliance-driven programs where identities aren’t required for operations.
Custom fields created inside a flow are set to Text by default, so if you need a field to behave like a Number or a Date & Time (especially for campaign scheduling), you can update its type from Contacts → Fields by selecting the field, choosing the correct Field Type, and saving—then ensuring existing stored values match the new type.
A contact is an end-user record in your RapidPro.app workspace who can be created manually, automatically when a new address interacts through a channel, or imported in bulk, and whose fields, addresses (URNs), and preferred channel settings determine how you store data and how messages are delivered across SMS, Telegram, Messenger, and other channels.
A “Featured” contact field is a field you mark to appear prominently at the top of a contact’s profile (and sometimes as visible columns in the Contacts list), so your team can quickly see the most important data for each person, with only non-empty values showing until a field is populated.
You can edit contact data in RapidPro.app manually on an individual contact, automatically in a flow using Update Contact, or in bulk via import, including updating default fields like name, groups, and addresses (URNs), adjusting address priority for correct outbound routing, and maintaining custom fields—while keeping in mind that manual date-only edits on Date & Time fields can change the time portion when you save.
RapidPro.app requires contacts to be archived before deletion, so the safest way to prepare many contacts at once is to identify the target set (often via a group or a smart group built from Last Seen On searches) and run a flow that updates Status to Archived, after which you can review the Archived folder and permanently delete those contacts when you’re ready.
Exporting contact groups lets you download the contacts from one or more groups as a file for reporting, backups, or sharing, by selecting the group in Contacts, using the Export option from the group menu, and then downloading the generated file from Notifications once it’s ready.
The Message History page on a contact record lets you review everything that happened for that contact in your workspace—messages sent and received, flow starts/completions/interruptions, and key updates like field or group changes—so you can understand context, confirm what ran, and troubleshoot issues like why a flow started or whether an update occurred.
Featured contact fields can appear as columns on the Contacts page, and you can control their left-to-right order by opening Contacts → Fields and dragging featured fields within the Featured section so the Contacts list shows the most important columns first.
RapidPro.app lets you check where a contact field is referenced across your workspace (for example, which flows use it), which is helpful before renaming or changing a field, cleaning up old logic, or troubleshooting unexpected behavior linked to that field.
